Michael Kinsley points out that the Downing Street memo, allegedly a smoking gun demonstrating the Bush Administration’s plans to cook intelligence to justify going to war in Iraq, is little more than a summary of the major headlines around the time it was written (July, 2002), not some privileged and new inside information.

Nevertheless, he’s enjoying the brouhaha "as an encouraging sign of the revival of the left."

Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes a certain amount of ideological self-confidence. It takes a critical mass of citizens with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them. It takes a promotional infrastructure and the widely shared self-discipline to settle on a story line, disseminate it and stick to it.

It takes, in short, what Hillary Clinton once called a vast conspiracy.

By his standards, it seems to me, the left has never been gone.